Bike Travel: Trempealeau County, Wisconsin

The Perfect Getaway

Welcome to cycling nirvana, the American Dairyland edition&mdash; where cows, not cars, bear sole witness to nearly perfect rides.

emily furia

(Photo by )

It is somewhere near the top of the world that I begin to wonder about this place. Not the actual top of the world, of course—I mean the spot that is the namesake attraction on the official Top of the World Tour, a 23-mile ride created by the enthusiastic and intensely friendly organizers of a newly established riding hotbed in remote western Wisconsin.

This particular global zenith looms at the crest of a relatively gentle climb that I'm surprised to find rises only about 400 feet—an ascent on which I pushed a little harder than usual, eager to see what lay ahead. When I arrive near the front of our loosely organized group, I step off my bike and scan the horizon: It's pretty, sure enough. For the past hour, we pedaled through a patriotic anthem's worth of scenic cliches— spacious blue skies, amber waves of grain, even a fruited plain or two—and from this vista there is lots more of the same, bathed in late-afternoon sunlight.

But I really have no idea why this particular landmark might have gained such a lofty designation until I look down, and there it is: a bright globe painted on the surface of the road. On an earlier section of the climb, someone had helpfully sprayed "VIEW!" onto the pavement, along with an arrow. Now, Ron McKernan, president of the Bicycle Club of Trempealeau County (BCTC), looks around and smiles as he watches riders pop over the crest in twos and threes. "Well," he says, "it's the top of Trempealeau County, anyway."

Ah. This moment of congenial hyperbole went to the heart of a question that had been clawing at me ever since I'd begun to hear, months earlier, of the discovery of a new cycling nirvana in the Midwest. Reports told of velvety-smooth empty roads and rolling hills that escaped bulldozing glaciers 10,000 years back. Apparently the place was so beguiling that some 19th-century traveling preacher had proclaimed it to be the literal Garden of Eden.

The whole thing sounded vaguely preposterous. But the buzz was intriguing enough for me to book a flight that would get me there in time for the three-day Trempealeau Invitational Ride Event, or TIRE, which takes place each September. It's one of no less than six yearly bike rides in Trempealeau, most of which are dedicated to local delicacies such as catfish or broiler chickens.

And now here I stand, trying to muster a proper camera smile as I hoist my bike above my head for the obligatory Top of the World photo op—at a whopping 1,200 feet above sea level.

Cycling nirvana? Garden of Eden? Or just some kind of good old-fashioned Midwestern hucksterism that went viral? I have only the next four days to find out for myself.

He was a circuit-riding Methodist preacher who happened upon this landscape— perhaps even this very same vista—sometime in the 1880s. The Rev. David Van Slyke, it's safe to say, might have bought the whole top-of-the-world gambit: He was so taken with the area that in 1886 he published his manifesto, to which he attached the modest title Found at Last: The Veritable Garden of Eden, or a Place that Answers the Bible Description of that Notable Spot Better Than Anything Yet Discovered.